14 ms·

Typing fast is about latency, not throughput

271 points by chriskrycho 3y ago

anotherhue 3y ago
Any latency in any system high enough to interrupt your thought process hurts. Unfortunately it's one of those hard to market things that people don't know they want, so it's (rightfully?) never prioritised. I wish we had better consumers.
joeframbach 3y ago
To put it into networking terms, the brain-finger output is a leaky bucket. The brain fills the buffer, and the fingers commit at some interval. The buffer is fairly small, and overflows are simply forgotten. The buffer has both time-based and size-based eviction policies. The faster you can type, the less you might forget.
- georgewsinger 3y ago
  This is a good way to put it.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Just flush the buffers more frequently and problem solved. The brain-finger output is never the bottleneck, as the brain part itself takes a lot of time before outputting anything.
jsweojtj 3y ago
I completely agree with this. I've been working on my own 30 day challenge to boost my typing speed, and the reason is similar to what's stated in this article: it's about latency, it's not the seconds saved. It's mentioned in the article, but I mostly think of it as: the faster one types, the shorter the iteration time. When you can type roughly as fast as you'd normally speak, it's a totally different experience than t-y-p-i-n-g each word of a sentence.
- leetcrew 3y ago
  I kinda agree, but I've also been humbled time and time again by older devs who literally hunt and peck with two fingers. I even asked one how she fixed so many nasty bugs each week while barely knowing how to type. her response: "I think deeply about problem, then type correct solution first or second time".
  - jsweojtj 3y ago
    Sure, I think the depth of thinking or problem solving is clearly important. But, I don't think your claim is in tension with the article's claim that being able to type fast lowers a barrier (or provides a benefit) that's more than simply the "time it takes to literally type". There's more there there.
  - tom_ 3y ago
    You can type quickly and still think deeply about the solution or whatever. Typing fast won't help when you're stepping through the code one line at a time, and it won't help when you're just sitting there with your eyes closed at your desk waiting to find out what to do next. But it is still helpful when you're talking to people in Slack.
codefined 3y ago
> It’s difficult to type and think at the same time, so any time spent writing is a pause in thoughts, which can derail the flow. I'm a competitive typist. I'm also a programmer. The main positive that I see is that typing no longer requires thought. I think of the code I want to write and it's transcripted onto the computer. I would say that it's more advantageous to type _accurately_ than quickly. Typing competitions generally require 100% accuracy, which gives me a great amount of belief that what I'm typing is correct, without having to look at it / check it over and get side tracked from the code itself.
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  Until now I thought I was a good typist. As I tried writing a rebuttal I realized that while I don't "think" the motions, I do have to think about each letter, what case to use, the actual spelling of the word. VS just thinking the thoughts. I did know a guy once who was one of our rockstar devs. While he was incredibly smart, I think his real superpower was how fast he typed. The words just appeared on the page. And if you were over his shoulder, his accuracy didn't decrease that much. When someone is watching me, I lose 50% accuracy.
  - iteria 3y ago
    For me typing is muscle memory. My fingers just do the thing necessary to produce words. I slow down to a crawl typing random strings of characters or new words/names because I don't actually know how to touch type I think. I just know what finger movements produce a word. It's kind of like how you don't think about how to ride a bike. It's just something you do in the same way that you don't manually breath although you could. Typing correctly when someone is watching us more about not not letting someone's possible judgment distract you. When you are manually typing, it's just not as fast.
    - WesleyJohnson 3y ago
      Mildly chuffed to see there is someone else out there like this; I'm the exact same way. I don't touch type properly, don't use home row, but type at a pretty decent clip when it's familiar - even code. Slow down quite a bit in new territory. What sometimes gets me though - I think one word, but type another. It's almost always the same starting letter or letters though. It's like the muscle memory kicks in, but takes the wrong fork in the road or something. Very odd.
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
I guessed that this would be arguing something similar to the "tests should be very fast" argument. There, the point is that anything that causes you to context shift is bad. The feedback loop of code/test/break/fix is everything. But I think after reading that the argument was more akin to webpage load times. Sure, a few extra seconds isn't measurably a lot, but there's a feeling of responsiveness that matters to our psyche, even if according to wall time it's not a big deal. This I find more plausible. I've seen code. I know how damn lazy we can be. People seem to be willing to spend hours of pain to avoid writing tiny helper structs, or writing helper methods, or giving functions/variables names with multiple words. Still, 80 wpm seems like a lot off hand. That's coming up on regular speaking speed. I wonder if I could test the difference on myself to see if it bothered me; maybe add something that slows my typing rate to 80?
- codefined 3y ago
  Most people typically speak in the 130 - 180 word per minute range, although this can vastly change based on context. Preprepared speeches, arguments and monologues generally have a higher pace than a usual conversation between two people.
- tommychillfiger 3y ago
  I'm a pretty fast typist (also guitarist - maybe related?), and I did a speed test with my coworkers for shits and giggles not long ago. I got 110wpm with 100% accuracy although it was a fairly simple prompt. Some semicolons, commas, and quotations, but nothing crazy. I would definitely say it feels like I am typing nearly (but not quite) as fast as most people speak. The benefit for me is honestly handicapped by the fact that most people can't type that fast so I don't save any time when actually communicating with others since I have to wait for their response either way. That being said, I don't think I would code anywhere near that fast. Maybe years later when I'm far better at it than I am now. I probably type around 60-70wpm if I'm writing some basic SQL where I know what I'm looking for, I would guess. When I was in college, it definitely was helpful being able to type quickly so that I could workshop ideas and phrase structures in papers more or less in real time. I honestly almost never wrote drafts, I'd just revise as I went along in that fashion.
- 3y ago
taeric 3y ago
I mean, maybe? The absolute largest obstacle any of these examples will have to overcome, though, is all of the amazing stuff that was done in the past. And all of the amazing things that are done today with long feedback loops. Like, I get it. This seems to be a low hanging fruit that you should consider. But it seems somewhat likely that you will draw the line below stenography. We don't even teach shorthand to people anymore, and that would fall into all of these arguments, as well.
- yipbub 3y ago
  The amazing stuff often has certain level of challenge, excitement, and reward behind it that compensates for the long feedback loops. It's not necessary for sure, but it sure is nice!
  - taeric 3y ago
    Right. My assertion would be that, if you internalize the work, you can do far more mentally than you can physically. As such, if you can work a lot of the exploration and experimentation mentally, you can't beat that feedback loop. Now, integrity of signal is obviously a problem there. If you have a problem in your mental execution, you are likely to miss it. So, you do have to do some physical experimentation. But, for prose and the like, you don't have to type as you think.
userbinator 3y ago
With far more people doing remote work now than pre-2020, IM is another way in which typing speed is very important for productivity, and this likely has a teamwide effect too --- if most of your team can type nearly at the speed of thought, then everyone waiting for the slowest member to share his thoughts on some discussion gets irritating rather quickly. Yes, I know there are audio calls, but with IM it's much easier to be doing more than one thing at once, and talking into each other isn't a problem.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  If you work at home, why are you typing into things like Slack? I dictate all my comms, and it's way faster than typing. I use Google's speech input.
  - WD40forRust 3y ago
    [dead]
  - cthalupa 3y ago
    I don't really agree with the premise of the article, but my sustained typing throughput sits around 140wpm, and for 10s bursts can hit 170+. This is WAY faster than I can talk. But I don't think this typing speed provides me the advantages the article professes - as others have noted, I am much more gated by the time I spend thinking before typing than I am the typing process itself. Dropping to 80wpm is going to influence the amount of garbage I throw out arguing with people on the internet far more than it would doing anything actually productive. To the point of having to pause thought while typing, I don't find this to be particularly true. I'll still be thinking of how exactly I want to word something as I'm typing it, and will make minor adjustments on the fly.
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    Hmm, it's easier for me to type than to talk I think. Talking requires more focus.
    - RheingoldRiver 3y ago
kazinator 3y ago
When you say "Doing X fast is about Y" it means that Y is the key to doing X fast. The headline here is misleading; it's supposed to be "The Benefit of Typing Fast is the reduced Latency, not the Throughput". If you wanted high throughput, what you could do is type at 20 wpm, and do so continuously all day without taking a break: minute after minute, cranking out twenty new words. Your daily throughput would be higher than that of many a 160 wpm typist who only wields that skill in short bursts throughout the day. The benefit of typing fast is that in those moments when you need something banged up, you see the result faster: the latency from starting to type to completing the intended change is lower with faster typing.
umvi 3y ago
Eh, I don't know if I agree. For me the bottleneck is my brain. I spend far more time thinking than typing. Being able to type faster would only save me a small amount of time compared to being able to think faster. I guess to steelman it, it's like investing in a faster 3D printer so you can iterate on your CAD faster. There's some value there I suppose.
- eimrine 3y ago
  You are talking about a throughput part of problem only not even a word about latency. If you are going to not think about what finger will press "A" key then your brain the bottleneck is going to be less like a bottleneck. Not touchtyping while typing means misusing your limited neocortex resources instead of just utilizing your muscle memory.
readthenotes1 3y ago
Does CTRL-TAB (or whatever is used for auto-complete) count as a word?
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  Not in measuring WPM / typing speed but... You need one heck of a quick editor to be able have suggestions showing up and selecting the suggestion be quicker than just typing the darn thing. If you know what you need to type that is (which is another topic btw). I've got my editor setup with a very quick way to pick up suggestions (which I optimized to minimize both the number of keypresses needed to pick a suggestion and the finger travel distance [it's configured to use the "stronger" fingers first, no pinkies, and it's configured so that the most likely suggestion is on keys in the hands home position]). Even that way, it's still typically faster to type the whole thing. And don't get me started on slow as molasses IDEs that exhibit noticeable delays when showing suggestions. To put it simply: even if you count auto-complete as a word, it's highly unlikely you'll be anywhere near close to 80 wpm (which ain't even that quick).
- rgoulter 3y ago
  Stuff like autocomplete or GitHub's copilot suggestions are helpful for reducing the time it takes put the code you want on the screen, sure.
  - eichin 3y ago
    Not to deny your particular experience - but The Humane Interface (Raskin, 2000) talks a bunch about how doing comparisons between keyboard and mice (and hybrid interfaces) was difficult because user's self-reported experience of the time interacting was inconsistent with actual measurements - there's some cognitive editing of the boring parts, or something like that :-)
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
On the other hand, I would have a very difficult time dictating what I want to write, because... well I almost feel like I speak too fast! My voice goes faster than my thoughts.
mistercow 3y ago
I love it when there’s a blogpost I’ve been meaning to write for years, and someone else comes along and does a good job writing up the same point, and with better framing.
renewiltord 3y ago
Well, easy test is to use high-latency device. Only prints one letter every 100 ms. You will still spend negligible time typing to thinking. Will you be worse programmer? I think so. Input device is for transmitting thoughts. Should be seamless, blend to background. If ever becomes foreground, you lose flow state.
crtified 3y ago
Auto correction systems are a relevant external factor, in some typing contexts. For example, one (probably bad, but who's to say??) habit I've picked up recently is to cheese [0] the Googling of things - saving a massive zero.point.bugger_all seconds per time - by fat-fingering my search queries in a rush, without bothering to spell words correctly. What did Samuel L Jackson say, exactly? - why, "thta movei abotu bible speehc", of course - first result [1], done! None of this pesky 'stopping to think about what order the letters go in' business! [0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cheese%20strategy https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cheese%20str... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=thta+movei+abotu+bible+speehc https://www.google.com/search?q=thta+movei+abotu+bible+speeh...
bhairoxx 3y ago
What’s the best modern IDE and editor which offers the lowest latency? I haven’t come across anything faster than sublime text so far.
- thornewolf 3y ago
  does sublime have plugins? I love sublime but I would consider vim + plugins to be faster+more modern.
  - nicoburns 3y ago
    It does have plugins
- tmtvl 3y ago
  Probably Emacs, at least when it comes to "best". I don't know a good way to measure latency but it seems fine to me.
- phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
  Maybe https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/
- lawn 3y ago
  Neovim has been the most responsive in my experience, way better than heavyweights like vscode and even Emacs.
- recursive_fruit 3y ago
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block_dagger 3y ago
It's about what you type, not how fast you type it. /typed at 113 wpm
- cantSpellSober 3y ago
  False dichotomy /swiped and autocompleted at ?? wpm
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dchftcs 3y ago
Back in the day I heard stories of how some of the better ACM ICPC world final participants turned out to be rather slow typers. But the idea was that they figured out what to do before they type, and their own clarity of thought allowed them to type correct code without having to backtrack. It helped that most of the time the solutions are pretty short. I consider myself a pretty good problem solver of contest problems, but often I have to type code the same way people use pencil and paper to go through drafts, so I can't relate that well.
jkingsbery 3y ago
> It’s difficult to type and think at the same time I'm pretty good at typing, but not anything special, at around 90-95 words per minute. I type while thinking all the time, although usually the thinking is the slow part. Other have mentioned speed and accuracy, but one thing that has been a huge advantage to me is being able to type confidently enough while not looking at the keyboard or screen (or only checking infrequently). It is pretty helpful to be able to have a conversation looking at the person while taking notes, rather than saying "let me write that down" every 5 seconds, interrupting the flow of the conversation.
Eduard 3y ago
the preceding knowledge acquisition before starting programming takes the overwhelming majority of typing. this includes web searches, asking questions in forums, IRC,. ...
j7ake 3y ago
It’s why copilot is such a game changer. It can fill out chunks of code faster than any typer alive. Latency is about one second.
yashap 3y ago
Not the core point of the article, but … > To be clear, at a steady state in a mature project, I get something like 125 lines of code into production per week. I don’t think this is uncommon, but it’s wild to me that so many companies let their dev productivity degrade to this level. I work at a decent sized startup, 8 years old, fairly large codebase, and even junior devs who are pretty new to the company are averaging a couple hundred LOC/week shipped to prod, while the most productive devs are averaging ~1K LOC/week. We spend plenty of time keeping the dev env fast, keeping CI (build, test and deploy) fast, minimizing risk even with minimal QA (strong test coverage, canary deploys with auto-rollback, strong alerting), and refactoring to reduce complexity. But even still, ~60% of overall dev time is spent on product stuff, and this other ~40% is SO worth it if it keeps devs ~10x as productive. An environment where even strong devs only average ~125 LOC/week is just so, so unproductive, it’s crazy to me that companies let this become the norm. Prior to my current company (which I would consider very high productivity), I worked at a place where the productivity was more inline with 125 LOC/week (experienced, fully on-boarded devs were around 200 I’d guess), I can see how this happens, but it’s crazy to me that so many companies LET it happen.
- lovich 3y ago
  That was a reference per project, how many engineers have only a single project they maintain? I’ve had between 5-160(way too many to realistically maintain) at every point in my career but it never got to 1. I think the lowest was 3 for a month period inbetween sunsetting one project as the contract had ended and then getting assigned a new project because I had the spare capacity
- viraptor 3y ago
  There's a level of mature projects where you don't really do new features anymore. There's polish and some changes and focusing on more reliability instead. And in those cases, you need lots more testing and validation and not much stupid code. I had one leg in development and one in operations and had weeks where I merged 10 lines of change - and they were properly tested and important 10 lines and that was how long they needed take. LOC is a silly metric - don't let it become your dick measuring contest or expect it to correlate with level and you'll learn to appreciate the small, difficult changes too. (the lower my LOC got, the longer my documentation, diagrams and project proposals got)
__mharrison__ 3y ago
Some very famous programmers I know are hunt and peckers. (Lack of) Typing speed has not hindered their career.
- erfgh 3y ago
  How do you know that it has not hindered their careers?
  - __mharrison__ 3y ago
    Great point. These folks are staff engineers or principal engineers, so I assume others recognize them as authority figures.
lordwiz 3y ago
I agree that latency is important, the way in which you can type out things without spending extra time in delays can be a huge productivity boost, One sort of analogy we can give is driving a car with good response time, even if the car is not having a good top speed, the acceleration we get when we push the pedal is enough to think we are going fast. But throughput can also have a dominating factor, but its reliant on other areas, like typing out an already prepared article. For operations that require thought, latency is important
fijiaarone 3y ago
I type no more 25 wpm with at least a 10% error rate, but I don’t have to think about it at all. But I have never been slowed down by typing latency. I spend half my day researching and half my day spacing out and the remaining 2/3 of the day in meetings and still get more done — with fewer lines of code — than the average developer.
culebron21 3y ago
After I practiced and increased speed from 250 to 380 char/s, the effect was that I started writing in IM larger messages and explaining things more thoroughly. This became much easier than earlier. So I'd agree, that you may write down things quickly or write a lot more in a minute. For coding this means you easily write comments, for messages or articles means you can write a lot more in one moment, which means you write a lot more elaborately.
mozey 3y ago
Touch typing is something I should've invested in much earlier, can't imagine how I ever coped without this ability. Another thing that really helped me is the "Alternative finger positioning" described here: https://typingsoft.com/typing.htm https://typingsoft.com/typing.htm It feel much more natural not having to bend your wrists. Is anyone else also doing this? Whenever people ask me how to learn touch typing I look for native Linux or macOS app that teach this technique, but I haven't found any yet...
ceeam 3y ago
Why don't the schools, regular ones, teach proper ten finger touch typing? But then, will it still be a common vital skill in let's say 20 years? (I think yes)
- eviks 3y ago
  Why are we still using qwerty? These systems are not build for efficiency, as are very conservative
  - ceeam 3y ago
    From what I read the alternatives aren't seriously better when real world tested.
    - eimrine 3y ago
      What is your definition of seriously? Dvorak has 70% keypresses on the home row, with the best left/right hand alteration approach possible, with ability to switch to Programmer version of it if needed. I don't know what real-world tests can leave all of these features unnoticed. Dvorak layout is a magnum opus of the guy who was willing to arrange the letters in a best possible way for human, while qwerty is a clever trick to fool a customer for the sake of selling typewriters.
      - tekla 3y ago
        If its that much better, but no one uses it, who the hell cares. You can espouse all the features you want, but if testing shows that it doesn't really matter to anyone, meh.
        eimrine 3y ago
        What is your definition of anyone? I am teaching Dvorak to some really young students, whose habits are not malformed with Qwerty. They are extremely thankful to me, no one is willing to return to Qwerty, time to gain a touchtyping skill is 10 hours from zero to hero. So, my "anyone" reports that Qwerty does not matter to him. Probably your observation is based on the fact that an old dog can not learn a new trick.
Ferret7446 3y ago
The author is missing the point. If your editor doesn't have abbreviations, snippets, completion, etc., you're doing it wrong. If you can type above ~80 WPM (which basically just means you can touch type), then using the proper tools your effective WPM is easily above 150 and thus totally irrelevant. Or put in other words, once you can touch type, you are far better off improving your tools and workflows than practicing typing. In a competition you might train your legs, but in real life you get in a car.
- stkdump 3y ago
  If he is writing 125 lines per week, then it is hardly going to matter. He could be typing with his nose and get the job done.
  - dataflow 3y ago
    > If he is writing 125 lines per week, then it is hardly going to matter. He could be typing with his nose and get the job done. Writing 125 lines is not the same as getting 125 lines of code into production
    - stkdump 3y ago
      The sad reality of large software companies. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if there are engineers who spend their entire career without getting any of their code into production before each of their projects are cancelled.
- UglyToad 3y ago
  Agree with this, if one is thinking in terms of typing letters out you're working at entirely the wrong level of abstraction and with the wrong primitives. I often use the example of ".toString" being meaningful whereas ".tosling" is nonsense (unless you have defined it elsewhere). I'm not even sure if that's the correct capitalization of the to string method in JS, but I shouldn't have to care. If my tools can't tell me which one is valid to use in the current context, then the tools are bad and I should look for better tools. (This may not be universally applicable and maybe Lisp is the promised land etc etc. But raw text input speed is a silly metric to prioritize and leads to a local maxima in programming)
jagaur 3y ago
Sorry
ginko 3y ago
I find the most beneficial thing about being able to touch type as a programmer is that you don't need to concentrate on the task of typing. That way you don't lose your train of thought so easily while working on something.
stephc_int13 3y ago
Typing speed is not a bottleneck, staying in the zone is. Training yourself to do less effort / having more fun while writing code is a good way to stay in the zone longer. But it is not enough in itself, tooling (fast compiler especially) can break or improve the flow substantially. I’d say that typing speed should only be seen as an optimisation target once the tooling is really smooth.
HPsquared 3y ago
Like any skill it's about cultivating a set of "hardwired co-processors". The more skilled you are, the more of these tasks can be handled in parallel, for example typing and reading, thinking. Or, for example, walking and chewing gum at the same time. It's like how a learner driver needs to focus on the task fully, while an experienced driver only seldom needs conscious thought to execute the process. Or a pianist sight-reading and playing the notes, while also interpreting the piece on a higher level. It's all about parallel processing
lynx23 3y ago
I am a touch typist since 30 years. I don't feel like I am thinking while I am typing. Typing happens automatically. Much like it works for musicians with sufficient practice. After a certain point, things become automatic, and you no longer consciously think about each and every key you press.
aloer 3y ago
Is this the right place (/s) for me to complain about a regression in iOS 17.1 and 17.2 (beta) where typing too fast will randomly switch to other apps? [1] It’s such a frustrating experience that I’ve noticed my communication has gone down noticeably in the past two weeks. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSBeta/comments/1774w2h/ios_171_db3_typing_on_the_keyboard_randomly/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSBeta/comments/1774w2h/ios_171_db...
awiesenhofer 3y ago
And then there is actual keyboard latency as well: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/ https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/
bsza 3y ago
This post and this comment section both feel to me like they’re from a parallel universe where no one knows that LOC isn’t a measure of quality but a cost. You want to keep it as low as possible while solving the problem at hand. As a matter of fact, you can often increase the quality of the product by removing code. Typing fast won’t make you a better programmer. It will only encourage you to type before you think. It is amazing how much can be done with how little code if you give your brain a chance to actually process what you’re doing. I highly recommend it.
- topaz0 3y ago
  I feel obliged to point out that the post explicitly says that the benefits of fast typing for them has nothing to do with being able to produce more LOCs/sentences.
kaba0 3y ago
> Someone writing code can think of how to structure the code Then, just think about it, and not type it out like a caveman prematurely. Also, no one on Earth has ever written continuously for 5 seconds outside of typing competitions. You don’t have 5 seconds of coherent text buffer available in your mind even for natural text, let alone codes. So that +3 seconds is complete nonsense.
ZeWaren 3y ago
In my opinion, latency is a super important concept that got forgotten once we moved every application to web interfaces. I remember the 90s and the 20s, when everything happened locally on the local hardware. It was quite easy to type fast, move the focus around in the various forms using tab and shift-tab, move from tabs and windows with ctrl/alt-tab; and there was keyboard shortcuts for most things. I remember being able to execute complex operations between multiple applications using only my keyboard and without having to use any brain power between each step. Now most things are moved to cloud applications and we interact with them with web browsers. Keyboard shortcuts are (mostly) gone, and each click or operation triggers a request on the other side of the world with a high HTTP latency, and that prevents the brain from chaining them for free. I remember being able to do almost everything using my keyboard. Now good luck interacting with a web console without switching back and forth from keyboard to mouse for 50% of the steps. I guess that's also why many developers (including myself) still love the CLI environments.
- kobalsky 3y ago
  > I remember the 90s and the 20s, when everything happened locally on the local hardware I think there's a bit of rose tinted glasses here. You could literally see windows and icons being drawn on the screen in the 90s. Even text UI were slow to draw on screen. We have it good today. Regarding keyboard shortcuts we are good too. I barely use a mouse nowadays. I use Vimium for Chrome to "click" on elements in pages, i3 keyboard shortcuts to jump to specific applications or workspaces, and the mouse emulator on my keyboard (olkb) to click or use the scrollwheel on the odd thing that doesn't want to work with a keyboard. Luckily many programs have adopted the command palete (most editors, vscode, gimp, etc) so it's easy to quickly invoke commands without memorizing arcane shortcuts.
- foobarchu 3y ago
  > and each click or operation triggers a request on the other side of the world Heck, each keystroke does this on a lot of websites, usually the culprit is some kind of overly ambitious search function. My biggest pet peeve is trying to type something via phone keyboard and losing half the word because it's ignoring inputs made while it's waiting on some http request. I notice the worst offenders are retailer websites (Menards, Target, Walmart, etc)
ubermonkey 3y ago
> It’s difficult to type and think at the same time Maybe for the author. I think best at the keyboard. As others have noted, once you reach the point where the typing is both quick and unconscious, words just kind of happen. Obviously at a gross level one's typing speed isn't the bottleneck in coding; you need so little ASCII on screen vs. with prose. However, being able to get even "bad" out quickly can help you rough out an algorithm quickly. The ability to get the code onscreen at the speed of thought is very, very valuable.
itissid 3y ago
Sometimes calmly thinking about what you want to type next is 1/2 the joy...
fluxem 3y ago
I wish my productivity was bound by my typing speed and not my thinking
agg23 3y ago
My limiting factor is _command_ throughput in my brain; coming up with the words I want and how to spell them massively slows me down. I really wish I could figure out how to go faster (~80 WPM) because I'm essentially limited by the speed my internal narrator dictates to me, which is close to realtime speaking speed. This is less of a problem while coding, but I still think it's quite relevant.
throw1234651234 3y ago
Standard qwerty people, how do you get around the arrow keys? It seems to be the only thing that reliably throws me off-cadence, when I have to reach to the bottom right to move around in code.
- fragmede 3y ago
  vim-mode movement keys in editor, along with emacs keybindings ctrl-a, e, w etc on the command line. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliptheweb/bash-shortcuts-cheat-sheet/master/moving_cli.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliptheweb/bash-shortcuts-...
deleted 3y ago
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271 points by chriskrycho 3y ago

Any latency in any system high enough to interrupt your thought process hurts. Unfortunately it's one of those hard to market things that people don't know they want, so it's (rightfully?) never prioritised. I wish we had better consumers.

joeframbach 3y ago

To put it into networking terms, the brain-finger output is a leaky bucket. The brain fills the buffer, and the fingers commit at some interval. The buffer is fairly small, and overflows are simply forgotten. The buffer has both time-based and size-based eviction policies. The faster you can type, the less you might forget.

georgewsinger 3y ago
This is a good way to put it.
kaba0 3y ago
Just flush the buffers more frequently and problem solved. The brain-finger output is never the bottleneck, as the brain part itself takes a lot of time before outputting anything.

jsweojtj 3y ago

I completely agree with this. I've been working on my own 30 day challenge to boost my typing speed, and the reason is similar to what's stated in this article: it's about latency, it's not the seconds saved. It's mentioned in the article, but I mostly think of it as: the faster one types, the shorter the iteration time. When you can type roughly as fast as you'd normally speak, it's a totally different experience than t-y-p-i-n-g each word of a sentence.

leetcrew 3y ago
I kinda agree, but I've also been humbled time and time again by older devs who literally hunt and peck with two fingers. I even asked one how she fixed so many nasty bugs each week while barely knowing how to type. her response: "I think deeply about problem, then type correct solution first or second time".
- jsweojtj 3y ago
  Sure, I think the depth of thinking or problem solving is clearly important. But, I don't think your claim is in tension with the article's claim that being able to type fast lowers a barrier (or provides a benefit) that's more than simply the "time it takes to literally type". There's more there there.
- tom_ 3y ago
  You can type quickly and still think deeply about the solution or whatever. Typing fast won't help when you're stepping through the code one line at a time, and it won't help when you're just sitting there with your eyes closed at your desk waiting to find out what to do next. But it is still helpful when you're talking to people in Slack.

codefined 3y ago

> It’s difficult to type and think at the same time, so any time spent writing is a pause in thoughts, which can derail the flow. I'm a competitive typist. I'm also a programmer. The main positive that I see is that typing no longer requires thought. I think of the code I want to write and it's transcripted onto the computer. I would say that it's more advantageous to type _accurately_ than quickly. Typing competitions generally require 100% accuracy, which gives me a great amount of belief that what I'm typing is correct, without having to look at it / check it over and get side tracked from the code itself.

jiveturkey 3y ago
Until now I thought I was a good typist. As I tried writing a rebuttal I realized that while I don't "think" the motions, I do have to think about each letter, what case to use, the actual spelling of the word. VS just thinking the thoughts. I did know a guy once who was one of our rockstar devs. While he was incredibly smart, I think his real superpower was how fast he typed. The words just appeared on the page. And if you were over his shoulder, his accuracy didn't decrease that much. When someone is watching me, I lose 50% accuracy.
- iteria 3y ago
  For me typing is muscle memory. My fingers just do the thing necessary to produce words. I slow down to a crawl typing random strings of characters or new words/names because I don't actually know how to touch type I think. I just know what finger movements produce a word. It's kind of like how you don't think about how to ride a bike. It's just something you do in the same way that you don't manually breath although you could. Typing correctly when someone is watching us more about not not letting someone's possible judgment distract you. When you are manually typing, it's just not as fast.
  - WesleyJohnson 3y ago
    Mildly chuffed to see there is someone else out there like this; I'm the exact same way. I don't touch type properly, don't use home row, but type at a pretty decent clip when it's familiar - even code. Slow down quite a bit in new territory. What sometimes gets me though - I think one word, but type another. It's almost always the same starting letter or letters though. It's like the muscle memory kicks in, but takes the wrong fork in the road or something. Very odd.

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

I guessed that this would be arguing something similar to the "tests should be very fast" argument. There, the point is that anything that causes you to context shift is bad. The feedback loop of code/test/break/fix is everything. But I think after reading that the argument was more akin to webpage load times. Sure, a few extra seconds isn't measurably a lot, but there's a feeling of responsiveness that matters to our psyche, even if according to wall time it's not a big deal. This I find more plausible. I've seen code. I know how damn lazy we can be. People seem to be willing to spend hours of pain to avoid writing tiny helper structs, or writing helper methods, or giving functions/variables names with multiple words. Still, 80 wpm seems like a lot off hand. That's coming up on regular speaking speed. I wonder if I could test the difference on myself to see if it bothered me; maybe add something that slows my typing rate to 80?

codefined 3y ago
Most people typically speak in the 130 - 180 word per minute range, although this can vastly change based on context. Preprepared speeches, arguments and monologues generally have a higher pace than a usual conversation between two people.
tommychillfiger 3y ago
I'm a pretty fast typist (also guitarist - maybe related?), and I did a speed test with my coworkers for shits and giggles not long ago. I got 110wpm with 100% accuracy although it was a fairly simple prompt. Some semicolons, commas, and quotations, but nothing crazy. I would definitely say it feels like I am typing nearly (but not quite) as fast as most people speak. The benefit for me is honestly handicapped by the fact that most people can't type that fast so I don't save any time when actually communicating with others since I have to wait for their response either way. That being said, I don't think I would code anywhere near that fast. Maybe years later when I'm far better at it than I am now. I probably type around 60-70wpm if I'm writing some basic SQL where I know what I'm looking for, I would guess. When I was in college, it definitely was helpful being able to type quickly so that I could workshop ideas and phrase structures in papers more or less in real time. I honestly almost never wrote drafts, I'd just revise as I went along in that fashion.
3y ago

taeric 3y ago

I mean, maybe? The absolute largest obstacle any of these examples will have to overcome, though, is all of the amazing stuff that was done in the past. And all of the amazing things that are done today with long feedback loops. Like, I get it. This seems to be a low hanging fruit that you should consider. But it seems somewhat likely that you will draw the line below stenography. We don't even teach shorthand to people anymore, and that would fall into all of these arguments, as well.

yipbub 3y ago
The amazing stuff often has certain level of challenge, excitement, and reward behind it that compensates for the long feedback loops. It's not necessary for sure, but it sure is nice!
- taeric 3y ago
  Right. My assertion would be that, if you internalize the work, you can do far more mentally than you can physically. As such, if you can work a lot of the exploration and experimentation mentally, you can't beat that feedback loop. Now, integrity of signal is obviously a problem there. If you have a problem in your mental execution, you are likely to miss it. So, you do have to do some physical experimentation. But, for prose and the like, you don't have to type as you think.

userbinator 3y ago

With far more people doing remote work now than pre-2020, IM is another way in which typing speed is very important for productivity, and this likely has a teamwide effect too --- if most of your team can type nearly at the speed of thought, then everyone waiting for the slowest member to share his thoughts on some discussion gets irritating rather quickly. Yes, I know there are audio calls, but with IM it's much easier to be doing more than one thing at once, and talking into each other isn't a problem.

jeffbee 3y ago
If you work at home, why are you typing into things like Slack? I dictate all my comms, and it's way faster than typing. I use Google's speech input.
- WD40forRust 3y ago
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- cthalupa 3y ago
  I don't really agree with the premise of the article, but my sustained typing throughput sits around 140wpm, and for 10s bursts can hit 170+. This is WAY faster than I can talk. But I don't think this typing speed provides me the advantages the article professes - as others have noted, I am much more gated by the time I spend thinking before typing than I am the typing process itself. Dropping to 80wpm is going to influence the amount of garbage I throw out arguing with people on the internet far more than it would doing anything actually productive. To the point of having to pause thought while typing, I don't find this to be particularly true. I'll still be thinking of how exactly I want to word something as I'm typing it, and will make minor adjustments on the fly.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Hmm, it's easier for me to type than to talk I think. Talking requires more focus.
  - RheingoldRiver 3y ago

kazinator 3y ago

When you say "Doing X fast is about Y" it means that Y is the key to doing X fast. The headline here is misleading; it's supposed to be "The Benefit of Typing Fast is the reduced Latency, not the Throughput". If you wanted high throughput, what you could do is type at 20 wpm, and do so continuously all day without taking a break: minute after minute, cranking out twenty new words. Your daily throughput would be higher than that of many a 160 wpm typist who only wields that skill in short bursts throughout the day. The benefit of typing fast is that in those moments when you need something banged up, you see the result faster: the latency from starting to type to completing the intended change is lower with faster typing.

umvi 3y ago

Eh, I don't know if I agree. For me the bottleneck is my brain. I spend far more time thinking than typing. Being able to type faster would only save me a small amount of time compared to being able to think faster. I guess to steelman it, it's like investing in a faster 3D printer so you can iterate on your CAD faster. There's some value there I suppose.

eimrine 3y ago
You are talking about a throughput part of problem only not even a word about latency. If you are going to not think about what finger will press "A" key then your brain the bottleneck is going to be less like a bottleneck. Not touchtyping while typing means misusing your limited neocortex resources instead of just utilizing your muscle memory.

readthenotes1 3y ago

Does CTRL-TAB (or whatever is used for auto-complete) count as a word?

TacticalCoder 3y ago
Not in measuring WPM / typing speed but... You need one heck of a quick editor to be able have suggestions showing up and selecting the suggestion be quicker than just typing the darn thing. If you know what you need to type that is (which is another topic btw). I've got my editor setup with a very quick way to pick up suggestions (which I optimized to minimize both the number of keypresses needed to pick a suggestion and the finger travel distance [it's configured to use the "stronger" fingers first, no pinkies, and it's configured so that the most likely suggestion is on keys in the hands home position]). Even that way, it's still typically faster to type the whole thing. And don't get me started on slow as molasses IDEs that exhibit noticeable delays when showing suggestions. To put it simply: even if you count auto-complete as a word, it's highly unlikely you'll be anywhere near close to 80 wpm (which ain't even that quick).
rgoulter 3y ago
Stuff like autocomplete or GitHub's copilot suggestions are helpful for reducing the time it takes put the code you want on the screen, sure.
- eichin 3y ago
  Not to deny your particular experience - but The Humane Interface (Raskin, 2000) talks a bunch about how doing comparisons between keyboard and mice (and hybrid interfaces) was difficult because user's self-reported experience of the time interacting was inconsistent with actual measurements - there's some cognitive editing of the boring parts, or something like that :-)

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

On the other hand, I would have a very difficult time dictating what I want to write, because... well I almost feel like I speak too fast! My voice goes faster than my thoughts.

mistercow 3y ago

I love it when there’s a blogpost I’ve been meaning to write for years, and someone else comes along and does a good job writing up the same point, and with better framing.

renewiltord 3y ago

Well, easy test is to use high-latency device. Only prints one letter every 100 ms. You will still spend negligible time typing to thinking. Will you be worse programmer? I think so. Input device is for transmitting thoughts. Should be seamless, blend to background. If ever becomes foreground, you lose flow state.

crtified 3y ago

Auto correction systems are a relevant external factor, in some typing contexts. For example, one (probably bad, but who's to say??) habit I've picked up recently is to cheese [0] the Googling of things - saving a massive zero.point.bugger_all seconds per time - by fat-fingering my search queries in a rush, without bothering to spell words correctly. What did Samuel L Jackson say, exactly? - why, "thta movei abotu bible speehc", of course - first result [1], done! None of this pesky 'stopping to think about what order the letters go in' business! [0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cheese%20strategy https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cheese%20str... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=thta+movei+abotu+bible+speehc https://www.google.com/search?q=thta+movei+abotu+bible+speeh...

bhairoxx 3y ago

What’s the best modern IDE and editor which offers the lowest latency? I haven’t come across anything faster than sublime text so far.

thornewolf 3y ago
does sublime have plugins? I love sublime but I would consider vim + plugins to be faster+more modern.
- nicoburns 3y ago
  It does have plugins
tmtvl 3y ago
Probably Emacs, at least when it comes to "best". I don't know a good way to measure latency but it seems fine to me.
phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
Maybe https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/
lawn 3y ago
Neovim has been the most responsive in my experience, way better than heavyweights like vscode and even Emacs.
recursive_fruit 3y ago
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block_dagger 3y ago

It's about what you type, not how fast you type it. /typed at 113 wpm

cantSpellSober 3y ago
False dichotomy /swiped and autocompleted at ?? wpm

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dchftcs 3y ago

Back in the day I heard stories of how some of the better ACM ICPC world final participants turned out to be rather slow typers. But the idea was that they figured out what to do before they type, and their own clarity of thought allowed them to type correct code without having to backtrack. It helped that most of the time the solutions are pretty short. I consider myself a pretty good problem solver of contest problems, but often I have to type code the same way people use pencil and paper to go through drafts, so I can't relate that well.

jkingsbery 3y ago

> It’s difficult to type and think at the same time I'm pretty good at typing, but not anything special, at around 90-95 words per minute. I type while thinking all the time, although usually the thinking is the slow part. Other have mentioned speed and accuracy, but one thing that has been a huge advantage to me is being able to type confidently enough while not looking at the keyboard or screen (or only checking infrequently). It is pretty helpful to be able to have a conversation looking at the person while taking notes, rather than saying "let me write that down" every 5 seconds, interrupting the flow of the conversation.

Eduard 3y ago

the preceding knowledge acquisition before starting programming takes the overwhelming majority of typing. this includes web searches, asking questions in forums, IRC,. ...

j7ake 3y ago

It’s why copilot is such a game changer. It can fill out chunks of code faster than any typer alive. Latency is about one second.

yashap 3y ago

Not the core point of the article, but … > To be clear, at a steady state in a mature project, I get something like 125 lines of code into production per week. I don’t think this is uncommon, but it’s wild to me that so many companies let their dev productivity degrade to this level. I work at a decent sized startup, 8 years old, fairly large codebase, and even junior devs who are pretty new to the company are averaging a couple hundred LOC/week shipped to prod, while the most productive devs are averaging ~1K LOC/week. We spend plenty of time keeping the dev env fast, keeping CI (build, test and deploy) fast, minimizing risk even with minimal QA (strong test coverage, canary deploys with auto-rollback, strong alerting), and refactoring to reduce complexity. But even still, ~60% of overall dev time is spent on product stuff, and this other ~40% is SO worth it if it keeps devs ~10x as productive. An environment where even strong devs only average ~125 LOC/week is just so, so unproductive, it’s crazy to me that companies let this become the norm. Prior to my current company (which I would consider very high productivity), I worked at a place where the productivity was more inline with 125 LOC/week (experienced, fully on-boarded devs were around 200 I’d guess), I can see how this happens, but it’s crazy to me that so many companies LET it happen.

lovich 3y ago
That was a reference per project, how many engineers have only a single project they maintain? I’ve had between 5-160(way too many to realistically maintain) at every point in my career but it never got to 1. I think the lowest was 3 for a month period inbetween sunsetting one project as the contract had ended and then getting assigned a new project because I had the spare capacity
viraptor 3y ago
There's a level of mature projects where you don't really do new features anymore. There's polish and some changes and focusing on more reliability instead. And in those cases, you need lots more testing and validation and not much stupid code. I had one leg in development and one in operations and had weeks where I merged 10 lines of change - and they were properly tested and important 10 lines and that was how long they needed take. LOC is a silly metric - don't let it become your dick measuring contest or expect it to correlate with level and you'll learn to appreciate the small, difficult changes too. (the lower my LOC got, the longer my documentation, diagrams and project proposals got)

__mharrison__ 3y ago

Some very famous programmers I know are hunt and peckers. (Lack of) Typing speed has not hindered their career.

erfgh 3y ago
How do you know that it has not hindered their careers?
- __mharrison__ 3y ago
  Great point. These folks are staff engineers or principal engineers, so I assume others recognize them as authority figures.

lordwiz 3y ago

I agree that latency is important, the way in which you can type out things without spending extra time in delays can be a huge productivity boost, One sort of analogy we can give is driving a car with good response time, even if the car is not having a good top speed, the acceleration we get when we push the pedal is enough to think we are going fast. But throughput can also have a dominating factor, but its reliant on other areas, like typing out an already prepared article. For operations that require thought, latency is important

fijiaarone 3y ago

I type no more 25 wpm with at least a 10% error rate, but I don’t have to think about it at all. But I have never been slowed down by typing latency. I spend half my day researching and half my day spacing out and the remaining 2/3 of the day in meetings and still get more done — with fewer lines of code — than the average developer.

culebron21 3y ago

After I practiced and increased speed from 250 to 380 char/s, the effect was that I started writing in IM larger messages and explaining things more thoroughly. This became much easier than earlier. So I'd agree, that you may write down things quickly or write a lot more in a minute. For coding this means you easily write comments, for messages or articles means you can write a lot more in one moment, which means you write a lot more elaborately.

mozey 3y ago

Touch typing is something I should've invested in much earlier, can't imagine how I ever coped without this ability. Another thing that really helped me is the "Alternative finger positioning" described here: https://typingsoft.com/typing.htm https://typingsoft.com/typing.htm It feel much more natural not having to bend your wrists. Is anyone else also doing this? Whenever people ask me how to learn touch typing I look for native Linux or macOS app that teach this technique, but I haven't found any yet...

ceeam 3y ago

Why don't the schools, regular ones, teach proper ten finger touch typing? But then, will it still be a common vital skill in let's say 20 years? (I think yes)

eviks 3y ago
Why are we still using qwerty? These systems are not build for efficiency, as are very conservative
- ceeam 3y ago
  From what I read the alternatives aren't seriously better when real world tested.
  - eimrine 3y ago
    What is your definition of seriously? Dvorak has 70% keypresses on the home row, with the best left/right hand alteration approach possible, with ability to switch to Programmer version of it if needed. I don't know what real-world tests can leave all of these features unnoticed. Dvorak layout is a magnum opus of the guy who was willing to arrange the letters in a best possible way for human, while qwerty is a clever trick to fool a customer for the sake of selling typewriters.
    - tekla 3y ago
      If its that much better, but no one uses it, who the hell cares. You can espouse all the features you want, but if testing shows that it doesn't really matter to anyone, meh.
      - eimrine 3y ago
        What is your definition of anyone? I am teaching Dvorak to some really young students, whose habits are not malformed with Qwerty. They are extremely thankful to me, no one is willing to return to Qwerty, time to gain a touchtyping skill is 10 hours from zero to hero. So, my "anyone" reports that Qwerty does not matter to him. Probably your observation is based on the fact that an old dog can not learn a new trick.

Ferret7446 3y ago

The author is missing the point. If your editor doesn't have abbreviations, snippets, completion, etc., you're doing it wrong. If you can type above ~80 WPM (which basically just means you can touch type), then using the proper tools your effective WPM is easily above 150 and thus totally irrelevant. Or put in other words, once you can touch type, you are far better off improving your tools and workflows than practicing typing. In a competition you might train your legs, but in real life you get in a car.

stkdump 3y ago
If he is writing 125 lines per week, then it is hardly going to matter. He could be typing with his nose and get the job done.
- dataflow 3y ago
  > If he is writing 125 lines per week, then it is hardly going to matter. He could be typing with his nose and get the job done. Writing 125 lines is not the same as getting 125 lines of code into production
  - stkdump 3y ago
    The sad reality of large software companies. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if there are engineers who spend their entire career without getting any of their code into production before each of their projects are cancelled.
UglyToad 3y ago
Agree with this, if one is thinking in terms of typing letters out you're working at entirely the wrong level of abstraction and with the wrong primitives. I often use the example of ".toString" being meaningful whereas ".tosling" is nonsense (unless you have defined it elsewhere). I'm not even sure if that's the correct capitalization of the to string method in JS, but I shouldn't have to care. If my tools can't tell me which one is valid to use in the current context, then the tools are bad and I should look for better tools. (This may not be universally applicable and maybe Lisp is the promised land etc etc. But raw text input speed is a silly metric to prioritize and leads to a local maxima in programming)

jagaur 3y ago

Sorry

ginko 3y ago

I find the most beneficial thing about being able to touch type as a programmer is that you don't need to concentrate on the task of typing. That way you don't lose your train of thought so easily while working on something.

stephc_int13 3y ago

Typing speed is not a bottleneck, staying in the zone is. Training yourself to do less effort / having more fun while writing code is a good way to stay in the zone longer. But it is not enough in itself, tooling (fast compiler especially) can break or improve the flow substantially. I’d say that typing speed should only be seen as an optimisation target once the tooling is really smooth.

HPsquared 3y ago

Like any skill it's about cultivating a set of "hardwired co-processors". The more skilled you are, the more of these tasks can be handled in parallel, for example typing and reading, thinking. Or, for example, walking and chewing gum at the same time. It's like how a learner driver needs to focus on the task fully, while an experienced driver only seldom needs conscious thought to execute the process. Or a pianist sight-reading and playing the notes, while also interpreting the piece on a higher level. It's all about parallel processing

lynx23 3y ago

I am a touch typist since 30 years. I don't feel like I am thinking while I am typing. Typing happens automatically. Much like it works for musicians with sufficient practice. After a certain point, things become automatic, and you no longer consciously think about each and every key you press.

aloer 3y ago

Is this the right place (/s) for me to complain about a regression in iOS 17.1 and 17.2 (beta) where typing too fast will randomly switch to other apps? [1] It’s such a frustrating experience that I’ve noticed my communication has gone down noticeably in the past two weeks. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSBeta/comments/1774w2h/ios_171_db3_typing_on_the_keyboard_randomly/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSBeta/comments/1774w2h/ios_171_db...

awiesenhofer 3y ago

And then there is actual keyboard latency as well: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/ https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

bsza 3y ago

This post and this comment section both feel to me like they’re from a parallel universe where no one knows that LOC isn’t a measure of quality but a cost. You want to keep it as low as possible while solving the problem at hand. As a matter of fact, you can often increase the quality of the product by removing code. Typing fast won’t make you a better programmer. It will only encourage you to type before you think. It is amazing how much can be done with how little code if you give your brain a chance to actually process what you’re doing. I highly recommend it.

topaz0 3y ago
I feel obliged to point out that the post explicitly says that the benefits of fast typing for them has nothing to do with being able to produce more LOCs/sentences.

kaba0 3y ago

> Someone writing code can think of how to structure the code Then, just think about it, and not type it out like a caveman prematurely. Also, no one on Earth has ever written continuously for 5 seconds outside of typing competitions. You don’t have 5 seconds of coherent text buffer available in your mind even for natural text, let alone codes. So that +3 seconds is complete nonsense.

ZeWaren 3y ago

In my opinion, latency is a super important concept that got forgotten once we moved every application to web interfaces. I remember the 90s and the 20s, when everything happened locally on the local hardware. It was quite easy to type fast, move the focus around in the various forms using tab and shift-tab, move from tabs and windows with ctrl/alt-tab; and there was keyboard shortcuts for most things. I remember being able to execute complex operations between multiple applications using only my keyboard and without having to use any brain power between each step. Now most things are moved to cloud applications and we interact with them with web browsers. Keyboard shortcuts are (mostly) gone, and each click or operation triggers a request on the other side of the world with a high HTTP latency, and that prevents the brain from chaining them for free. I remember being able to do almost everything using my keyboard. Now good luck interacting with a web console without switching back and forth from keyboard to mouse for 50% of the steps. I guess that's also why many developers (including myself) still love the CLI environments.

kobalsky 3y ago
> I remember the 90s and the 20s, when everything happened locally on the local hardware I think there's a bit of rose tinted glasses here. You could literally see windows and icons being drawn on the screen in the 90s. Even text UI were slow to draw on screen. We have it good today. Regarding keyboard shortcuts we are good too. I barely use a mouse nowadays. I use Vimium for Chrome to "click" on elements in pages, i3 keyboard shortcuts to jump to specific applications or workspaces, and the mouse emulator on my keyboard (olkb) to click or use the scrollwheel on the odd thing that doesn't want to work with a keyboard. Luckily many programs have adopted the command palete (most editors, vscode, gimp, etc) so it's easy to quickly invoke commands without memorizing arcane shortcuts.
foobarchu 3y ago
> and each click or operation triggers a request on the other side of the world Heck, each keystroke does this on a lot of websites, usually the culprit is some kind of overly ambitious search function. My biggest pet peeve is trying to type something via phone keyboard and losing half the word because it's ignoring inputs made while it's waiting on some http request. I notice the worst offenders are retailer websites (Menards, Target, Walmart, etc)

ubermonkey 3y ago

> It’s difficult to type and think at the same time Maybe for the author. I think best at the keyboard. As others have noted, once you reach the point where the typing is both quick and unconscious, words just kind of happen. Obviously at a gross level one's typing speed isn't the bottleneck in coding; you need so little ASCII on screen vs. with prose. However, being able to get even "bad" out quickly can help you rough out an algorithm quickly. The ability to get the code onscreen at the speed of thought is very, very valuable.

itissid 3y ago

Sometimes calmly thinking about what you want to type next is 1/2 the joy...

fluxem 3y ago

I wish my productivity was bound by my typing speed and not my thinking

agg23 3y ago

My limiting factor is _command_ throughput in my brain; coming up with the words I want and how to spell them massively slows me down. I really wish I could figure out how to go faster (~80 WPM) because I'm essentially limited by the speed my internal narrator dictates to me, which is close to realtime speaking speed. This is less of a problem while coding, but I still think it's quite relevant.

throw1234651234 3y ago

Standard qwerty people, how do you get around the arrow keys? It seems to be the only thing that reliably throws me off-cadence, when I have to reach to the bottom right to move around in code.

fragmede 3y ago
vim-mode movement keys in editor, along with emacs keybindings ctrl-a, e, w etc on the command line. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliptheweb/bash-shortcuts-cheat-sheet/master/moving_cli.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliptheweb/bash-shortcuts-...

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